Everyone in this group owns a portable, some many portables. Fewer in
the group own tabletops and even fewer serious tabletops. Most of you
are just content to listen to the more powerful stations on the AM
shortwave band. A very few are serious DXer's who chase those very
faint far off stations at the limit of audibility.

What I write about is the owners of portables who are constantly
trying to maximise their portables performance with ever larger and
more powerful antenna's. This can actually be counterproductive as
portables are not designed to take a powerful antenna, rather they are
designed to maximise their performance only on the whip antenna.
Connecting more than 50ft/15m of wire to a portable is likely to bring
on all sorts of problems that will actually reduce good performance.
By this I mean that it will overload the front end of the radio and
lead to distorted sound and spurious signals all over the place.

I say this in relation to most of the portables in the $200 and $100
and less range. The Eton E1 at $500 is an exception and can
comfortably operate with a powerful receiving antenna, such as a good
active or 500ft/150m of longwire. My Sony 2010 overloaded badly with
too much wire and blew the front end twice as a result.

Don't put too much wire or too powerful an antenna on a portable.

When to upgrade to a tabletop such as the Palstar, Yaesu 100, Icom IC-
R75 etc? When you can actually connect a decent antenna and when you
want faultless sound from far distant stations. I see a lot of fella's
wasting their money on expensive table tops who live in apartments =
really a waste of money. A decent portable such as the Redsun RP2100/
Kaito KA2100/CC Crane SW will do just as well.

Sadly I see that Universal now only offer two tabletops for current
sale: the Icom R75 at $600 and the AOR 7030+ at $1500. The number of
SW listeners have really declined over the years. But that is where I
advocate buying a transceiver, as there is a wide variety on offer in
all price ranges, and that is why I myself have used transceivers in
the last three years. Of course there is always the preowned market
and eBay for used tabletop receivers.

Having waffled on about all that, there is a new branch of our
wonderful hobby appearing, and that is the "ultralight" receivers. The
creme de la creme of which appears to be the Eton E100. These chaps
modify this tiny little radio and get the most astonishing reception
out of them, but I hasten to add that a good tabletop is always
better.

So have fun, enjoy your radio's and good DX.

John Plimmer, Montagu, Western Cape Province, South Africa
South 33 d 47 m 32 s, East 20 d 07 m 32 s
Icom IC-7700, Icom IC-756 PRO III with MW mods
ERGO software
Drake SW8. Sangean 803A
Sony 7600D, GE SRIII, Redsun RP2100
Antenna's RF Systems DX 1 Pro Mk II, Datong AD-270
Kiwa MW Loop.
http://www.dxing.info/about/dxers/plimmer.dx